Watching the Watchers (Oneshots)
by SJlikeslists
Summary: These are short pieces that belong in my WtW universe. If you haven't read WtW and WtW (CF), then I cannot promise that they will make any sense. (random additions may occur)
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: _The Hunger Games_ is not mine.

She couldn't just sit in the Cartwrights' little shop and wait. She half suspected that her father had sent her running out to get her away from the worst of it, but she didn't know that for sure. What she did know was that as kind as it was for them to have gone, Delly and her little brother were out on an errand that was her responsibility. She needed to go for Mrs. Everdeen. She knew that it wasn't really fair to bother the woman in the midst of what must be her worry over Katniss, but she needed to get a resupply of whatever the mixture was that she had concocted to combat her mother's deterioration. She had to try. She had never seen her mother this bad off before. She needed to do something to help her (even if she already knew that there was nothing that she could do to stop the inevitable). She was not going to just sit here quietly out of the way when her mother was in pain. She was not going to just sit here allowing Mr. Cartwright to blunder around taking entirely too much time to wrap up her injured ankle until everything was all over.

She couldn't just go home either (as much as that was where she wanted to be). If there was the slightest chance the Mrs. Everdeen had something that could help, then she had to make sure that she got it. She would follow Delly as soon as Mr. Cartwright finished. She would either catch up with the Cartwright children, or she would meet them on their way back and take over. She wasn't really as hurt as Mr. Cartwright kept insisting that she was. She could worry about her ankle swelling later. She could assess the scrapes across her hands at a time when the few moments she had left to be with her mother were not slipping through her fingers. She waved the man off as he tried to offer her some water and insisted that she needed to go.

He looked awkward and unsure of what to say to that, and Madge was very certain that his wife had instructed him to keep her there as long as possible. Delly got her disingenuousness from her father, and the poor man couldn't seem to think of a pretense to attempt to use to get her to stay.

"It's okay," she told him having a sudden compulsion to comfort the man that made no sense given the hurry she was in and what she knew was waiting for her. "I know he sent me out on an errand to get me out of the way, but it might still help. I just need to be doing something."

He patted her on the shoulder and offered to walk her home. The lights went off before she could reply. She used his distraction over the sudden power outage to decline as politely and quickly as she could and made sure not to betray that her instinct was to hobble on her now securely wrapped ankle until she rounded a corner out of his sight. It hurt, but it was functional (and functional was all that she cared about at that moment). It was slowing her down, but running at full speed had ultimately only slowed her down anyway when she had fallen the first time over the uneven place in front of the shoe store. That uneven patch had been there for as long as she could remember, yet she had still managed to forget about it in her hurry to try to do something, anything to make the succession of seizures stealing the life out of her mother stop. She needed to pay attention to where she was going (especially now that even the scattered lights still on around the town had been extinguished). The twinge that shot up her leg every time she put weight on her ankle helped to keep her focused on the ground in front of her instead of what might be occurring in her absence.

She was three quarters of the way along the path toward the Victor's Village when she heard the humming sound, but she was too focused on what she was doing to realize what she was hearing for several moments after it first registered. When the fact that there were hovercrafts approaching finally filtered through her worry and driving need to move faster, she was just even with the little patch of trees that marked the invisible boundary between the Village and the rest of the District.

The next sound that she heard was not one that she had any experience with hovercrafts making. As she spun around to try to figure out what was happening, she lost her balance as her injured ankle seemed to crumble underneath her. She went down hard and barely managed to get her arms in front of her to keep herself from face planting under the first (and nearest to the path) of the trees. The first bomb landed in District 12 at nearly the same instant. Its sound swallowed up and covered the sound of the dead branch that was shaken loose by the tremor that landed squarely across her back. Madge, of course, did not realize that that was what had happened. All she knew was a sudden weight forcing her arms to lose their bracing purchase, her head slamming forward, and black.

When she woke up, the world was grey.

She seemed to be looking out between some sort of bars that she realized (after blinking heavily) were tree branches that had fallen down around her. The stinging in her side and the press of something across her hips told her that they had also fallen on top of her. She couldn't figure out why everything beyond the branches had become monochromatic. Then, she turned her head to the other side as a prelude to trying to wriggle her way out of the mess in which she had managed to land.

She was looking at the Victor's Village. It was oddly hazy, but it seemed otherwise normal. She took a minute to process and try to find her last memories to make some sort of sense of the situation. She turned her head back, and the truth dawned on her. The haze hovering over the Victor's Village was blowing from the direction in which she had first been looking. An untouched section of mostly unlived in houses was on one side of her. The other side of her (the side that should have held her home and the rest of the District) was nothing but ash and scattered smoke.


	2. How Gale Started Taking Tesserae

AN: In the third chapter of _Watching the Watchers_ , Hazelle mentions that she will always regret that Mrs. Everdeen did not start hiring out her healing services earlier. This is why (it is also why Gale was taking out tesserae before his father died).

Disclaimer: _The Hunger Games_ is not mine.

Hazelle held her youngest against her shoulder as she patted at his back in an attempt to dislodge some of the gunk that was inhibiting his ability to breathe. She had tried every remedy she knew (that she was able to get her hands on) - nothing was working on two of her little boys. Gale still gave muffled little coughs every now and again, but he had gotten better quickly. Either her remedies had worked for him, he had had a milder case, or he was just enough older that it didn't stick with him in the same way as it had his younger brothers.

She was trying very hard not to let her oldest see how worried that she was, but she suspected that she was failing. She had practically had to shove him out the door to leave for school in the morning, and he had been hovering close by from the moment he had gotten home. She had started making up things for him to do just to get him out of the room for a few moments. (It was not as though she had to be very creative about it; there were dozens of things that needed doing. Most of them were just things that she did not usually have him doing.)

She had sent him on a trip to the apothecary's earlier only to have him return with the news that it was locked and no one had answered his knock. There had been no one to answer the day before either, and her husband had gone to see what was going on after he had trudged home from the mines. She hated that. She didn't like sending him out for anything in the evenings (the last thing that he needed was to add yet another long walk to all he did during the day), but she was used to putting up with a lot of things that she did not like. She didn't particularly like the way he took their son out on the other side of the fence (any more than she liked the fact that he had to go himself), but she liked the thought of her children going hungry even less. Life was full of things like that - choices that you made based on which thing was better, not which thing you would have chosen if you could have had anything that you wanted.

The woods kept her children comfortable. The woods let them build up enough of a savings during the better summer months that they weren't so close to the edge when the cost of keeping their home warmer than freezing during the winter seemed to eat through every cent that came from her husband's paycheck from the mine.

She knew that something was very wrong as soon as she saw the expression on his face when he walked through the door. She sent Gale out to get the laundry from the line and waited for him to tell her what had the lines between his eyes etched so deeply into his forehead.

"He's had another attack," he told her sounding strangely hollow. Hazelle bit her lip as she remembered the last time that such a thing had happened. The man that ran the apothecary had suffered some sort of an episode shortly after his wife had died that had left the shop closed for just over three weeks. Her babies didn't have three weeks to wait. Vick had a hitching sound at the end of each breath that was getting worse by the hour. Rory was breathing so shallowly that she had found her hand hovering over his chest more times than she could count during the course of the evening to make sure that he hadn't stopped. She was exhausted and out of ideas. She didn't know anything else to try. She needed help. She needed the apothecary and his knowledge. The man might be a little gruff, but he knew his craft. She felt the tears that she had fought back all through her vigil welling up; she was desperate.

"What about the daughter?" She asked trying to think of anything else that she could throw into the gap that seemed to be forming in front of her widening the distance between herself and safety for her children.

"You know she hasn't had anything to do with him for years," her husband answered her.

"But now that he's ill . . .," she tried.

"She didn't show any interest the last time," he replied with a shake of his head. "I don't see that anything will change this time." He took a deep breath. "It's got to be the doctor. There is no one else."

"Can we do that?" She asked. No one from the Seam dealt with the District Doctor. It wasn't that it wasn't allowed; it was that they simply couldn't. Official policy was that all services must either be paid for as they were rendered or a paycheck from the mine could be garnished until the amount was covered. Not even people from the Town section of the District used the doctor most of the time. Most of them didn't have the money either (and none of them had the other accepted currency of a paycheck from the mine). Only District and mining officials, visitors, and (strangely) the children in the Community Home saw the doctor unless something extraordinary happened.

"It'll take every bit we've put aside for the winter and likely a good bit more," he told her in that same hollowed out tone that was sending a shiver down her spine.

"Then how . . .," she began even as a suspicion was forming in her mind. His next words confirmed it.

"It's Gale's birthday in a couple of weeks."

"No," she stated instantly.

"Hazelle," he sounded pleading.

"You can't," she told him. "We can't. We agreed," she continued. They had taken that option off the table the moment their son had been born. They had worked for more than eleven years to ensure that that was never needed. Every trip to the woods, every chance of getting caught and punished, every time she watered down her bowl of soup or added one more patch to a piece of clothing, every time that she simply did without something that the house needed - it was all to protect her boys from extra slips of paper with their names on it.

"Tell me what I'm supposed to do, Hazelle?" He demanded looking at her as if she had broken him with her reminder. "What else am I supposed to do?" She didn't know. She didn't have an answer for him. What else were they supposed to do? Were they supposed to assign some sort of a value to each of their children and decide who was more deserving of a better chance? She couldn't do that. They couldn't do that. How could anyone?

"I'll do it, Ma," came a soft voice from the doorway. It took a minute to realize that the quiet tone she was hearing actually belonged to her oldest that she usually had to shush when the littles were napping.

"Gale . . .," she began looking beseechingly at her husband only to find that there was nothing other than quiet desperation there looking back at her.

What else were they supposed to do?


	3. How Vick Spent Time with Madge

Disclaimer: _The Hunger Games_ is not mine.

Vick's legs swung back and forth as he sat on one of the counters in the kitchen at the home of the Mayor. He figured that his mother would give him one of her stern eyeballings if she knew where it was that he was sitting, but she didn't know. Besides, Madge was the one who had told him that it was alright to hop up there, and it was her house. She was perched right next to him, and she didn't even flinch when he swung his legs a little harder than he had intended and made a banging noise that sort of echoed through the room. Madge's house was nearly always echo-y. His house always had too much noise going on for any loud sounds to be out of the ordinary. Madge's house was always so quiet that it was like noise took the entire house by surprise.

He knew that because he spent a lot of time at Madge's house. Alright, so it maybe wasn't a lot a lot, but the only places he spent more time were home and school. He always made sure that Madge's house was the last place that he stopped when he made laundry deliveries for his mother so that he could linger for a while. He liked the word linger and had latched onto it when he had heard Madge use it once. It sounded much better than what his mother would call what he was doing. She would say that he was dawdling. He wasn't. That might sound like he was just making excuses, but he really wasn't. People were dawdling when they were trying to waste time. Vick was never just wasting time when he was lingering in the Mayor's kitchen or back garden. He was learning things - important things that they never taught him at school (and ones that he figured that Gale didn't even know).

Madge knew a lot of stuff that other people didn't. As he got older (and the more that he understood some of the things that Madge talked about), he thought that maybe there were some people who might know but would never talk about it. He thought it might be like the way that everyone knew but no one talked about how Gale went outside the fence to go hunting. Vick was going to have to learn all of that too, but Gale wouldn't teach him yet. Sometimes, he thought that Gale would have to run out of excuses for not teaching Rory soon because he went through so many of them, but he, sometimes, thought that Gale would keep refusing forever. He could have told his oldest brother that that wouldn't work. Rory would get tired of waiting and try to go out without being taught eventually. Gale probably wouldn't listen to him if he told him that. He looked at Vick a lot like he looked at Posy most of the time - like a baby that he needed to take care of (except Posy was a lot cuter and the only little sister that they had so Gale and the rest of them would let her get away with a lot more than any of the other siblings could get by with).

Vick wouldn't just take off and go on his own to see how things went the way that Rory would. He would find someone else to teach him. Katniss wouldn't, but if he figured out the right way to drop questions at Prim, then he figured he could find out quite a bit before anyone caught on to what he was doing. Rory called him a sneak sometimes, but Vick couldn't say that his brother was wrong about that or just making up names. He was sneaky. Madge had told him that it wasn't a bad thing to be. There were lots of times when being sneaky was an advantage - like how no one in his family had caught on yet that he did a lot of lingering at Madge's house.

She was nice to him. He felt bad for her because most people (even the ones from Town) didn't talk to her much. She was always in her too quiet house where no one seemed to talk to her much either. That was a shame because she had an awful lot of things to say. He had asked her once (when he realized that she was teaching him things and not just telling him stories) why she had decided to talk to him. She had said it was because he looked like he was someone who wanted to know. She was right. He did want to know. He just wished that he could tell more people, but Madge had said that he would know when it was the right time for that. She always talked to him like that - like it was okay that he might not understand everything yet but that was no reason to consider him too young to be learning.

He hadn't needed Madge to tell him that people were always watching. He knew that from his brother's not so very hidden poaching and fence ignoring. He was used to feeling like inside his home was safe from prying eyes though - Madge didn't even have that. There were people staying with her sometimes that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up (Madge never wanted him to linger when those types of people were there, but he always felt bad that he was leaving her alone with them). She told him that if you always assumed that someone was watching, then you never had to worry about messing up and letting them see something that they shouldn't. So, there was always something happening when she was telling him her stories - -they were weeding in the garden or she was feeding him a snack in the kitchen or something like that. He didn't know what all Madge said to explain away his presence, but he had heard one of the visitors in her house (one of the silly ones, not the hair up on the back of his neck ones) call him the besotted little puppy once. He thought that meant that they thought he kept coming because he thought Madge was pretty. He was okay with that - Madge was pretty. Besides, Madge said that you could get away with all kinds of things if you just let people see what they wanted to see.

She taught him how to listen to people to hear what they were saying in what they weren't saying. She taught him how to talk to the "guests" in her house if he ever had to so that they didn't really notice him. They had been working on something that Madge referred to as "playing" them as they sat perched on the kitchen cabinets while he sipped at a glass of milk and Madge cut up an apple. (Most of it would end up in his pockets and divided between Posy and Rory later. Posy was easy enough because she was used to her brothers slipping her extras when they could. Rory and he had come to a sort of an understanding that the Mayor's household did something called "tipping" when he picked up their laundry and that it would be best for everyone's ears if Gale were not made aware of that particular habit.)

"Make what you are showing them and telling them so interesting that they forget about what it was that they were thinking before you started up your show," she was saying as she slid the plate toward him.

"Don't you ever get scared that they'll catch you?" He asked as he started sliding the pieces around to divide them into three piles. He worried about that when the scary visitors came.

"All the time," she answered him in the tone that he had come to know meant that she didn't expect him to understand what she was about to say yet, but she wanted him to hear it so that he could tuck it away and think it over. "Some things matter more than being scared."

"Like when Gale hunts so we aren't so hungry," he whispered.

"Like that," she answered nodding her head.

"And the stories are like that?" He asked trying to draw the connection in his head. "Because . . .," he drew out the word slowly, "if we forget that it can be better, then we might forget that it's wrong?" He tried to string two years of listening to Madge's narration together. He shuddered. "I don't want to forget that it's wrong," he told her suddenly with tears welling up in his eyes without him being sure why they were there. Years of watching the Games with the blood and the death left him with a host of memories that were flitting back and forth across his mind. He didn't realize that he was shaking until he felt Madge put her arm around his shoulders. "I'd ruther Mamma and Gale let me starve," he whispered as he remembered some of the comments about the bloodshed that he had heard from both the "guests" in Madge's house and the people who came to the Reaping with betting slips in their hands over the years.

Madge didn't say anything. She just hugged him into her side.

"Tell me a before story," he whispered into her shoulder wanting the comfort of a reminder that things hadn't always been this way (which meant that they could be different someday again). He picked one of the ones that he had turned over in his mind most often - the one that always came back to him in the weeks leading up to the Reaping when he couldn't get away from the worry that Gale was going to be taken away from them. "Tell me about the 2A back when we had a chance to stop them."


End file.
